Widow of Nobel laureate is twice raided by thieves ‘seeking medals’
THE widow of Sir James Black, the Nobel Prize-winning pharmacologist, has twice been targeted by burglars apparently trying to locate his highly valuable medals.
Lady Rona Black, 77, revealed that she was first burgled at the end of December, when she returned home from a holiday to find her bedroom “trashed” and significant efforts made to drill a safe out of a wall.
In response, she turned the property in south London “into Fort Knox” installing a motion-activated burglar alarm, CCTV and outside lights. But the intruders returned on Wednesday, prompting Lady Black to publicise the raids in order to send a message to the perpetrators that there are no valuable medals in her possession. Sir James, who discovered beta-blockers, donated his Nobel medal – thought to be worth at least £500,000 – to the National Museum of Scotland in 2009 and it is on display in Edinburgh.
His Order of Merit medal – the UK’S highest honour, which is awarded personally by the Queen – was returned to Buckingham Palace on his death aged 85 in 2010. The medal is priceless as there are only 24 in circulation.
Lady Black, known professionally as the eminent dermatologist Prof Rona Mackie, acknowledged that the Order of Merit was “a beautiful bit of important jewellery” but stressed that when the holder dies, the next of kin hands it back.
“They do seem interested in medals and I just wonder if it is that,” she said. “That they came back does make you worry what they are looking for, and to what extent they will go to get it.”
The first raid took place on Dec 29 and Lady Black believes she disturbed the raiders as she returned home from spending Christmas in Australia.
Her bedroom door was blocked from the inside and when she went out via a rear terrace, she discovered the windows of a glass door had been carefully broken to prevent the alarm sounding. “They had trashed the bedroom,” she told the Evening Standard. “Behind one of the wardrobes was a small safe. They had obviously spent a lot of time trying to drill it out. There was cement dust everywhere.”
The raiders did not remove the safe but managed to force it open and took medals belonging to Sir James, including his knighthood insignia, and jewellery including Lady Black’s grandmother’s wedding ring. On Wednesday, after she left the house, a neighbour called to say her alarm was going off again. Burglars, this time captured on her new CCTV, smashed through her bedroom window and pulled the alarm from a wall.
“They seemed to be looking for more medals,” Lady Black said. “This time round he has taken jewellery and a cache of medals in my husband’s study, mostly non-precious medals.” Lady Black said it had been “a very unpleasant week,” adding: “I was a bit shaken. The police think it’s a return visit of someone who didn’t get what they wanted the first time.”
Sir James, a Scottish pharmacologist, won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1988 for his work on drug development. Known as the father of analytical pharmacology, he was said to have relieved more human suffering than thousands of doctors could have done in careers spent at the bedside.